The Importance of Being Earnest review and star rating: ★★★★★
Oscar Wilde’s pointedly ridiculous comedy of manners about two men who conspire to both be called Earnest in order to win the affections of two different women is fairly hard to modernise. That’s because of the language, obviously, but also because, by and large, people want to see the Earnest in their mind’s eye: the Earnest with opulent, heavy set Edwardian drawing rooms full of fancily dressed people fannying around. Max Webster’s vivid new production has a go anyway: finding new life in a masterly adaptation that’ll please traditionalists too.
Of course the freshness doesn’t come from textual renovations. Twice the cast breaks from the story to perform little ditties dressed as daisies and an assortment of other flowers. Imagine Stephen Fry wearing an iridescent leaf five times his girth and doing the Jarvis Cocker dance move from the Something Changed video and you’ll have an idea. It’s strange and pointless, but then again, Wilde’s play is famously about nothing in particular – early critics hated that it was basically just a folly – so the playwright could feasibly have been delighted.
The Importance of Being Earnest: Stephen Fry and Olly Alexander slay
Also heading the billing is Years & Years singer Olly Alexander, who is adorably effete as leading man Algernon Moncrieff, sustaining an adorable playfulness in every fourth-wall breaking exchange. He tinkers James Blunt’s You’re Beautiful on the piano and makes knowing references to LGBTQ pub Royal Vauxhall Tavern, casting the audience a cheeky smile. He can do the more serious bits too, in case you were wondering if this was pointless star casting. Moncrieff goes after Jessica Whitehurst’s young and naive country-dwelling Cecily, while Nathan Stewart-Jarrett’s Jack Worthing pursues Kitty Hawthorn’s opinionated Gwendolen, who lives in the city.
Wilde’s piece, while ostensibly frivolous, was actually a biting satire about the closed-mindedness of the day and the weight of social expectation imbued upon suitors. The antagonist is Lady Bracknell, an overbearing class snob and mother to Gwendolen, who gets the play’s most famously quoted lines, including the disgusted pronouncement of “A handbaaaaag!” Gender-flipping the role is hardly new. David Suchet did it in 2015 and drag queen Betty Bourne in 1995, but Fry is obviously perfect: you hardly need to be there to imagine him delivering such bits as “To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.”
Like Ian McKellen’s turn as Mother Goose in 2023, you can imagine that this is clearly the role of a lifetime for Fry, who lugs buckets of suave campiness at every line. The rest of the cast, including Hugh Dennis as Reverend Chausuble and Shobna Gulati as Miss Prism, equally shine; Hawthorne’s Gwendolin and Kerr’s Cecily have even better love-you-hate-you chemistry than Alexander and Stewart-Jarrett, and that’s saying something.
You don’t need to do anything new with Earnest, it’s just bloody good fun as it is, but Webster has found a contemporary layer of silliness. That’s largely thanks to Rae Smith’s vivid set, particularly her poppy floral designs for the countryside scenes and imaginative costumes, which elevate Wilde’s story, occasionally lending it shades of a new, more abstract atmosphere. The little dancing scenes (drag queens come on at the beginning) are so camp that Wilde could never have imagined them; it’s impossible to know whether he would have approved. But if The Importance of Being Earnest was supposed to be joyous and escapist, this crack team transport.
The Importance of Being Earnest plays at the Noel Coward Theatre until 10 January; nationaltheatre.org.uk